


Killing Floor Blues

by unheroics



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Historical, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:21:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25860484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unheroics/pseuds/unheroics
Summary: Nicky found that war could still surprise him, even though he had often considered himself beyond the capacity to feel surprise.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 182





	Killing Floor Blues

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t think there’s a specific warning for ‘character gets blown up but gets better which is not significantly worse body horror than what we get in canon’ but, you know, that happens I guess.
> 
> Big thanks to Febricant for holding my hand throughout the writing of this thing.

War had always been a particular meeting of horror and creativity, but Nicky found that it could still surprise him, even though he had often considered himself beyond the capacity to feel surprise.

It surprised him that — as he held Andy’s remains with a familiar tenderness, the flesh stripped from bones and bones crushed to splinters and all around them, as ever horribly meat-like — he thought that this time perhaps death might take.

It surprised him further to think it with a sort of relief underlying the anticipation of loss, and further still when what was left of Andy’s chest cavity began to rise and fall in skittering half-starts as her lungs grew back.

“Viper one, what’s your status, over.”

It surprised him to hear his radio crackle with static and the voice of one of the kids hunkered down in the foxhole (a sunburnt boy from Oklahoma which he had never left before being dropped into the jungle), but of course like Nicky himself the radio had been outside the blast radius.

The grinding sound of helicopter rotor blades slicing through the air filtered in next, and distant shouting, and the acrid smell lodged all the way down his airways. He wished no one had ever invented barbecue so that he wouldn’t have to compare the stench of burnt people to it. He would have to respond to the call eventually, but until Andy’s body had measures to protect itself from further ruin he would hold her. She’d have done the same.

“Viper one, this is —”

One of Andy’s hands twitched and Nicky looked closely as cartilage formed only to be sheathed by muscle, then pink skin. It looked almost gelatinous in the moment before more dermal layers firmed it.

“For God’s sake, what is your fucking status.”

Another voice further from the radio: “Say something, Nico.”

“What, I thought his name was —”

By then Andy had enough tongue and lips to slur, “Motherfucking fuck, fuck, oh, fuck.”

Nicky smiled and reached for his radio.

The sun was still high enough to keep them in plain sight but relatively safe, as the VC preferred to attack long past dusk and Booker’s intelligence predicted the next airstrike for predawn. Having recently recovered from napalm burns Nicky was more worried about the latter.

But Andy would be on her feet again; they would lead the civilians hiding in a long-abandoned grain silo three klicks West into the next valley over, then redirect the remaining American troops away from the neighbouring settlements; and if they were particularly lucky Nicky would never have to watch Andy run after a half-starved girl to pull her out of the line of M-16 fire only to step on a landmine.

“Please tell me they still have some of those morphine tablets,” Andy said an indeterminable amount of time later. She was wrapped in Nicky’s mud and blood stained jacket since her own uniform had more or less evaporated, or melted into her body and had to be torn off.

Dragging her with her better-healed arm thrown over his shoulders Nicky couldn’t really shrug when he said, “I think the kids ground them up to cook when they ran out of coke.”

“Jesus.”

“You’ve had worse, Andy.”

“Probably,” she said with an exhausted sigh. Nicky held her as ungently as he could make himself; she hated to be offered more comfort than necessary. It hadn’t always been that way, but Quynh’s absence broke something in Andy that had previously allowed her to accept kindness.

Upon their return to the foxhole Joe — who had started going by the name to draw less attention but still was watched by boys with eyes bloodshot and ever shifting from too much cocaine — only clapped Nicky on the arm. He did it with an uncomfortable force as if to make his meaning clear when anything more declarative would be dangerous. The clench of his jaw was visible despite his beard.

“Booker thinks the mine was Soviet made,” he said while entirely ignoring the small group of gawking Americans. In the time they’d been embedded (or rather embedded themselves, posing as SOG and a CIA consultant) with the dwindling platoon Nicky had never seen any of the kids even approaching sober instead of half delirious from heat, fear or drugs. Otherwise he would have asked Joe to be more circumspect. “We shouldn’t have come here, we… fuck.”

Andy shook off Nicky’s arm which had supported her, and staggered only slightly. “Where else would you have us go.”

“Ma’am, are you…” One of the kids identified as KERRY by the tag sewn to the breast pocket of his uniform swayed towards Andy, then backwards. He looked pale under the dirt caked into his roundish face. “What the fuck happened?”

“Classified.”

“A new type of tech for recovering materiel,” Nicky said somewhat apologetically.

“Do you, uh, you need a medivac?” asked the boy from Oklahoma, who was the acting CO by the grace of being the oldest of the surviving platoon at twenty three years old.

Kerry laughed as if that idea was the most hilarious thing to come out of anyone’s mouth. “A medivac? You gonna pull one out of your ass? Sir?”

“If she needs a —”

“No one came when Riker got his leg blown off, no one’s gonna come.” This from a boy sitting in the dirt and hunched over with his hands clasped between his knees. He had been so still that Nicky thought perhaps he was dead. “No one’s coming.”

When the boys began arguing amongst themselves Joe said in Italian, “We’ll see about the mines tomorrow when we’re with the VC or Russians.” His face twisted in something that would have been a smile, but in the past several decades — much like Nicky’s capacity to feel surprise — it seemed sometimes that Joe had lost the capacity for humour, misplaced his beautiful volatile temper, but who could blame him. “It would be a nice change from getting blown up or shot at by Americans.”

“Something tells me we’ll get just as much friendly fire on the other side,” Andy said. She was standing more confidently on her own and had Nicky’s jacket wound tightly about herself, which made her bare legs appear even more incongruous. “Where’s Booker?”

Joe gestured to his right, where an M-9 half-track stood with all the doors open. It was so muddied that its drab green paint job was almost invisible. As Nicky walked closer he saw Booker bent over the open hood. There was grease smeared across his right cheek.

“Fixing her up?”

“We need to get these idiots out of here sooner than later,” Booker said, voice mangled from the short lengths of what looked to be copper wire held between his teeth. “There’s just five left. If they could leave in this it would speed things up.”

Nicky didn’t point out that they could use the transport themselves. Their sore feet would heal and besides a half-track would leave evidence of their passage. Once already Booker had to take a camera off a lanky Australian journalist near My Tho, where he’d been documenting the recovery of a weapons stockpile.

Nicky found a change of uniform for Andy in one of the bloodstained rucksacks where the Americans kept the things they’d taken off corpses to have clothes to change into. By Nicky’s reckoning they had all already lost the ability to be horrified or just lived in a state of such constant horror that no further gradation registered. Tearing identifying information from the uniform jacket, Nicky wondered when precisely he had stopped being horrified at his own actions.

He had been horrified at his own silence in Antioch and Jerusalem when fellow soldiers of God took unwilling women. He had been horrified to feel nothing at the sight of the first child he’d slain, _for of such is the kingdom of heaven_ , but he had been taught from birth to fear and obey so that when he had been called upon to kill it was with religious zeal layered over any small unenslaved parts of his mind. Courage and compassion were instilled in him by Joe, but even then at some point he became more cavalier about these things than he should be.

* * *

When it was full daylight Joe was kind enough to wait until they had moved on from the Americans before confronting Nicky. Presently they were enjoying the hospitality of a group of women camping at the edge of a mangrove swamp at what used to be a VC base, now wrecked from minigun fire. The women were not part of VC but held their AK-47s with the confidence of training and experience. Andy had done most of the talking as her Vietnamese, Mandarin and Russian were the most natural-sounding, and besides the women were more at ease when the rest of them kept their distance. Nicky tried not to wonder too deeply what had made them wary of strange men.

He also tried not to think of the weight that must have been crushing Andy from the moment they had disembarked from a PAVN cargo plane weeks prior but especially now when speaking what would have been Qyunh’s modern tongue. All of them, even Booker, were conscious of the space between their bodies where Qyunh’s unpresence lived like a sickness. It was an absence that generated its own gravitational field and Andy of course was the most affected: beneath the dirt and the blood and the chaotic enormity of war there was something cold about her that Nicky had never seen before. A corpselike resignation.

He tore into an MRE and made himself almost comfortable in the scant available shade, boots sinking into mud and mulch as he leaned against the sturdiest of the base’s three remaining walls. Joe found him as always, as if simply following a thread to the other half of himself.

“You need to radio back in, always. Fucking always,” he said. He slid down the wall beside Nicky so that their shoulders and knees could touch, which was more physical contact than Nicky felt able to withstand without cracking. Still, he didn’t withdraw.

“We’ve been separated on battlefields before,” he said.

“Maybe, but I haven’t heard a mine go off with you running towards it before.”

“Be fair. In ‘58 —”

“We’re not playing this game, Nico.” Joe shifted so that they were half-facing each other. A flicker of the old passion lit his eyes, which made Nicky think that he might not be irreparably changed. He looked away. “I don’t care if radiation poisoning is better or worse than a landmine. You radio back in.”

“Yusuf,” Nicky said before running out of words.

“Please.”

As a peace offering Nicky handed him the MRE. The taste of imitation spam was so revolting that Nicky would have thought it had been rotting in the sun since the last war or the one before that, but the packaging was new. In retrospect it was probably a shitty peace offering.

“Do you remember,” Joe started after chewing, grimacing in disgust, then chewing some more.

“If you were there with me I probably do.”

“The _São João_ ,” Joe said and added unnecessarily, “After the mutiny.”

“Ah.” The memory now just made Nicky nauseous, but sometimes he could still feel the phantom torture of being tied to the galleon’s mainmast and whipped until the lash scraped against exposed ribs, saltwater spray upon each open wound, when dying even briefly was a kindness.

“It was the longest it’s ever taken you to come back to me,” Joe said with a kind of brokenness that paled in comparison to how frantic he had been at the time. The longest minutes of his life; Nicky had his own. “I remember thinking: his God wants him back after all.”

Nicky smiled. “A very long time ago you told me you have more claim to me than He.” At the time it had frozen the blood in Nicky’s veins to hear something so patently blasphemous. It must have been in the early 1200s before Andromache and Quynh found them. More often than not they’d fought tooth and nail — both suspecting each other of having manifested as some kind of divine punishment — even for some time after the point at which Joe moved to strangle him but kissed him instead.

Nicky turned to face Joe more fully to see if the same memory was behind his eyes.

“If He exists then He gave you to me, and you’re mine,” Joe said.

With the same simplicity Nicky said, “And I’ll always come back. As long as you draw breath, I will come back.”

It was a promise neither of them could ever keep, but for the moment Joe pretended to believe it. The impermanence of their immortality was both a mercy and a source of debilitating fear. At times Nicky wished he’d died with Joe in their time — perhaps even as strangers in Jerusalem — because losing Joe after centuries of being threaded together like inosculated branches would unanchor him from sanity.

“On the _São João_ ,” he said eventually when Joe started to relax into him, succumbing at last to exhaustion, “you held me. I remember. In the middle of the ocean, in a pool of my own blood, you held me.”

“You held Andy?”

Nicky nodded. Then he knocked the back of his head into the wall behind him and shut his eyes, almost expecting an afterimage of Andy’s body. “There was so little left of her. I was afraid if I let her go the pieces would fall apart.”

Next to him he heard Joe’s breathing go erratic. Maybe he was seeing what Nicky had seen in his mind’s eye or maybe he was superimposing over it the thoughts of Nicky getting blasted to almost nothing, or himself.

“I didn’t think I was afraid of anything any more, except losing you,” Nicky said. He opened his eyes to the effusive canopy of overgrown mangrove trees and for the first time in at least two centuries he felt as though he were a living part of the world around him, a cell in an ecosystem. He turned to Joe. Wood scratched against the back of his head and snagged at his dirty hair. Joe was already looking back at him so they regarded one another in silence for a long moment.

“If I stop healing,” Nicky said, “will you kill me?”

“You know I’ll do anything you ask.”

For some morbid reason it made Nicky laugh, and that in turn made faint lines appear in the corners of Joe’s eyes in the only indication of a smile. It shouldn’t have been momentous but regardless took a measure of weight from Nicky’s shoulders. That smile, that particular smile, never failed to gut him. It was the smile that pushed him into Sisyphean battles and into learning to appreciate poetry and into loving so fiercely it seemed that immortality was the only way to experience that love in full.

“You say such sweet things,” he said.

* * *

Andy found them soon after, when Nicky was on the verge of falling into hopefully dreamless sleep. He’d long learned to conserve energy but thought at times that their bodies needed more rest than mortal people as recompense for the gruelling physicality of their work.

More comfortable away from the Americans, Joe had his arm around Nicky’s shoulders to keep him close, as he usually did in one way or another. Nicky opened his eyes to Andy’s footsteps in the damp dirt when their sound became pronounced over the lulling comfort of Joe’s heartbeat.

Joe stirred, then came fully awake when Nicky shifted against him. As she got closer the bleakness Andy carried with her these days became more visible; she was washed out somehow in a way Nicky had rarely seen, if ever.

“You up for some escort duty?” she asked without preamble. Nicky was nodding before she finished her sentence.

“Always, boss,” Joe said for them both.

The smile that pulled at her mouth was haunted on her thin face, but at least it was an expression. “Good,” she said. “We’ll double back to My Tho. Ha Lien —” she gestured to the group of women sitting in a semicircle passing around a bottle of Stoli, and Nicky made out the one the others seemed to defer to, dirt-streaked but with a stony dignity about her, forty or perhaps forty five years old “— has a contact who can only get as far as Vung Tau, so I figure we can smuggle them on a river transport.”

Nicky heard a soft buzzing in the split second before Joe slapped the side of his neck to kill the mosquito. He finally unwound his arm from around Nicky and said, “The Mekong doesn’t exactly provide safe passage these days.”

“Trust me.” Andy looked back towards Ha Lien and the other women, then to Booker bent over his semi-auto as he cleaned it with a filthy rag. “With what they’re running from, it’s worth the risk.”

* * *

They marched throughout the night double file, which naturally put Nicky besides Joe. Walking at the end of the small column they bracketed Ha Lien’s group with Booker at the centre and Andy leading up front.

Next to Booker one of the women who identified herself only as Huong kept careful watch: her MAS-36 was steady and her trigger discipline impeccable. She either had VC or Viet Minh training and she seemed to be an informal second in command to Ha Lien despite her youth. She couldn’t have been older than twenty.

It was improbably dark as they moved through the jungle, scanning the foliage for traps and the horizon for human activity, claustrophobic in a way Nicky thought he would never experience again after the trenches of Crimea. It was the anticipation of death from every direction and every noise magnified to create a cacophony of paranoia.

“We should go somewhere cold after this,” he said quietly to Joe to break the monotony. “And dry.”

“Mm, but the humidity makes your hair look very… avant garde.” At Nicky’s scoff Joe turned to him, quicksilver grin flashing in the moonlight. “It’s true. Byronic, even.”

Briefly Nicky considered entertaining the act but in the end he said, “You don’t need to do this, Joe. Not with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pretending,” Nicky said. “I know you. I can see how tired you are.”

“Who wouldn’t be.” This time it was Joe who scoffed. They walked without speaking while Nicky waited for Joe to break, knowing him well enough to expect that he would, until he did: “Do you think there are any limits? To this impulse people have. To destroy and to hurt. Always fucking hurt.”

Nicky thought of it often and took a morbid kind of pleasure in knowing how heretical such thoughts would be considered by his old faith. But it pained him with a gunshot kind of pain to know that Joe struggled with these questions as well, or that in a millennium of fighting and tenderness there were still things that Joe had not told him.

Instead of voicing it all he said, “It has always been bloody business, humanity. Only the weapons change.”

“Maybe Booker has it right to drink,” Joe said. He kicked a clump of damp moss aside and shook his head. “Maybe… I don’t know. You’re right. I’m tired, Nicky.”

Nicky watched his profile, the stubborn set of his expression. The white-knuckled grip he had on his rifle. His face was streaked with sweat and dirt but still, to Nicky, the most beautiful thing he had ever laid eyes upon. He hated to see Joe in such aimless pain, but Joe had always felt too much and too strongly. He was the one amongst their team most often left speechless with rage or weak with gratitude. Even after a thousand years his capacity for emotion humbled Nicky and left him ransacked with the inadequacy of his own feeling.

Choosing his words carefully he said, “When Andy and Quynh found us you did not hesitate. You said that to be immortal and not fight would be unconscionable. That apathy is worse than cruelty.”

“It would be,” Joe said. He sounded angry about it. “It is.”

“Our time hasn’t come yet,” Nicky said. He wanted to be gentle, but gentleness wasn’t what Joe needed, so he only added, “And this war will pass.”

Joe turned to him. Since they walked at the rear of the group they could slow down to really look at one another, mud and sweat and blood and all. As ever, the sight of Joe alone was enough to realign the sometimes tilting axis of Nicky’s resolve.

“And we’ll go somewhere cold,” Joe said with a ghost of his usual smirk.

“And dry.”

Joe laughed. It was such a wonder to hear. “Not Siberia, I hope,” he said with a significant twitch of an eyebrow, which startled Nicky into laughing too.

“Ha. No.”

“And we will not leave bed for days.”

Smiling now Nicky said, “Weeks, if you like.”

There was a moment during which Nicky thought Joe might retreat deeper into the sanctuary of meaningless humour, but what happened instead was that Joe nodded, more to himself than Nicky, and squared his shoulders and said, “All right. Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” he said again, this time with sincere conviction.

Nicky was close to asking if prayer would help — religion being a subject that to this day remained somewhat fraught — before a girl before him stumbled in the dark and he moved to help balance her. It was only a hand on her elbow and another hovering at her waist so she would not fall, but she flinched from the touch as though it were charged with electricity.

Nicky hadn’t caught her name, but her furtiveness of gesture and stifled affect, avoiding eye contact and looking to Andy with a terrified half-hope, were nothing new to him. He had seen it hundreds of times across hundreds of wars: the forgotten women who fell before the self-righteous entitlement of an invading army. Nicky had seen it in Jerusalem and Antioch and Pomerelia and Marignano, and in the many centuries following.

When he straightened he spotted Andy facing towards them with a directionless kind of frown, looking without seeing yet alert at the same time.

Eventually Nicky left Joe to walk on his own — or to be joined by one of Ha Lien’s group or perhaps Booker, whose loneliness as ever shone with the brightness of a lighthouse in a storm — and caught up to Ha Lien herself. She had history written into the lines of her face but he had seen her strength flagging. She was only human.

Offering to take her AK-47 and pack from her Nicky said, “May I help?”

She didn’t startle and gave him her things to carry with a measure of subdued gratitude. “Thank you,” she said. Her eyes moved briefly to Andy. “You are not Russian as she is?”

“No,” Nicky said. It was common for Andy to present herself as Russian in this region, these past decades. “We are an international group. We’re not aligned with any government.”

“You are still different than any mercenaries I have met.”

“You’ve met many?”

“Such is this war,” Ha Lien said with a shrug. “Chaotic.”

Nicky considered her weary posture and the lines forming firmly in the corners of her eyes, and was struck not for the first time by the realisation that regardless of her experience and her pain he would live long past her time or that of her descendants. The miserable stubbornness she used to collar her group together struck him as doomed and familiar in equal measures, though he supposed given a long enough timeframe everything gained a degree of familiarity.

He said, “We will do all we can to keep you safe.”

“Oh, and I am grateful.” She laughed without humour. Moonlight occasionally left patches of light on the skin of her face and on her muddied, cobbled together uniform. “I wish you had appeared three days ago. Perhaps you could have kept my daughter safe too.”

“I wish we could have,” Nicky said and meant it.

“That woman.” Ha Lien nodded to the front of the group. Andy, of course. “She keeps her word?”

It took Nicky a second to come up with an answer that was both truthful and noncommittal. He said, “Yes. Or she will die trying.”

With another nod Ha Lien walked away from him and in her absence Joe found his place back at Nicky’s side. They moved into the well-worn two-step at the rear of the column again, scanning the jungle for threats.

Joe knocked his shoulder into Nicky’s with no real force. “Always making new friends,” he said with a gesture towards Ha Lien up ahead. He spoke Italian so Nicky adjusted quickly and slid into into the more intimate cadence of one of their first shared tongues.

“She wears a crucifix.”

“Your God travels far and wide,” Joe said. When he smiled sideways at Nicky it was with a kind of cautious sarcasm that fractured something inside of Nicky’s determination to remain stoic, and he blamed that crack for saying: “A loving God who puts guns into His children’s hands.”

Joe only snorted. “The heat must be making you delirious; you haven’t blasphemed like this since — oh, probably Paris.” At Nicky’s disgusted outrage he said, “Too soon?”

“I’m glad you find it amusing,” Nicky said sourly.

“Since you’re right that it isn’t our time yet, I need to find my amusements where I can.”

If they were alone even despite the danger Nicky would have tripped him until they were rolling in the mud for the sheer impossible undying thrill of it. He missed — oh, he missed many things, though none of them as important as the one that remained, but he missed the longer periods of peace when their group could splinter for decades and come together again as though no time had passed. He missed travelling with Joe and along the way righting wrongs that were not world-changing. He missed the wonder of exploration without fear of discovery.

He missed riding into battle flanking Andy and Quynh, with Joe on the other side, and in perfect synchronicity with them finding at last the balance that he had never known through God. He missed battles fought on equal footing, before artillery and grenades and machine guns. Before the bomb. Worst of all he missed being new to immortality and callow or brainwashed enough to think that there could be honour in war, or fairness.

But all of it was pure theoreticals and not even wishful thinking. If such was the price of having Joe he would pay it without looking back, and be damned.

* * *

It was two days later while they waited for extraction and a northbound transport that Andy joined him on a rickety balcony overlooking the Mekong. They’d bid Ha Lien and her group farewell, and though Joe volunteered to escort them to Vung Tau they refused with good grace. Nicky hoped that they would get to their destination safely, but it was also a relief not to know. Presently he stood guard propped against the balcony railing, not entirely sure what to do with his hands in the absence of a rifle. If he had a sword strapped to his side he would at least rest one hand over the pommel in a swordsman’s gesture, grown intrinsic to his body long before humanity perfected firearms.

They had agreed before coming here that bladed weapons would be too conspicuous in an ongoing rather than singular mission: his sword and Joe’s lay in a vault in Aberdeen’s main Bank of Scotland branch, in safe deposit owned by Andy’s many aliases. Andy kept her labrys someplace none of them knew and they granted her the privacy out of respect.

When Andy joined him on the balcony only the squeak of the sliding door announced her, her footsteps sure and silent as always. In the moonlight something about her seemed skeletal. Free from immediate danger, Nicky thought perhaps it would do the team good to go their separate ways for a time. He had not seen Andy this defeated — to the point of showing physical signs — since she’d been fighting with the French resistance in ‘44.

She leaned against the railing beside him, gaze vigilant as she scanned their surroundings with the ease of long practice. “All right, Nicky?”

“We’re good,” he said. In the tiny gap she had left between the door and wall he could see Joe’s sleeping form, curled in on himself on the floor and cushioned only by blankets. He’d wanted to take first watch, but Nicky managed to convince him otherwise; it helped that their safehouse had a bath large enough to accommodate two grown men and that Joe was easily swayed by sex. “Booker?”

“Taking his sweet time getting back, but we do need the intelligence.” Andy sounded troubled and Nicky couldn’t blame her, as it seemed to him that Booker kept moving apart from the rest of them on a kind of self-destructive trajectory, and he and Joe and Andy had long forgotten the frame of reference needed to give him comfort. What did their words of support mean when Booker’s grief was eating him alive, so fresh still.

Nicky looked again towards Joe and inwardly staggered at the sense of relief, and gratitude, for the gift of sharing immortality with this man. Long enough to be unable to consider their lives separate but rather halves of a single soul, if such a thing existed. Long enough that fighting without Joe complementing his every move was wont to leave him off-balance, just as once Quynh had complemented Andy, over a thousand battles.

He tried to imagine — as he sometimes did in times of particular self-pity — going five hundred years without Joe at his side and even the thought of it clenched his gut, so it was all he could do not to bend over the railing and throw up.

“I never asked if Quynh brought you here before,” he said when he was sure he wouldn’t dry-heave as soon as he opened his mouth.

It took Andy a long moment to answer. Nicky knew she was picking her words, measuring the cost of opening her wounds too far. He wondered if they would ever heal or if they would remain festering, occasionally leaking ill blood when a passing barb snagged them. Andy tipped her head back, but in the dark Nicky couldn’t tell if her eyes were open. She might have been watching the sky or she might have been simply taking in the aliveness of the river and city around them, the people whose lifespans were as crucial as they were short.

“She did,” Andy said in the end. She gave Nicky a brief look, a ghost of that old fierceness. “A couple times. She liked to see how everything was changing, growing. Evolving. Sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Is Joe going to be all right?”

Blinking at the conversational turn Nicky said, “Why?” The second look Andy gave him was far kinder than he deserved for stalling. He took a deep breath and thought of Joe’s resolve, his pain. His fight to maintain a sense of humour. “Yes. I think so. It’s… a different kind of war.”

“That’s what we thought every time so far in this godforsaken century,” Andy muttered.

Her annoyance made Nicky smile. “Earlier too.”

“Mm.”

“Andy,” he said. She didn’t turn towards him but he watched her regardless, the familiar profile, the beloved clench of her jaw that meant things were not going her way, but she would make them comply with her demands anyway. “Are you well?”

That finally made her look a little more alive. Moonlight fell across the small lines at the corners of her eyes, illuminating the world-weariness and world-awareness of a number of lifetimes lived that Nicky couldn’t even imagine much less understand. She knew his immortality, but he could never fully know hers. All he could do was look back frankly and openly: to regard this woman who had at various times been a sister and friend and mother to him, almost godlike in her omniscience, the first ally untainted by shared history who would die for him and accept his sacrifice in return.

“Nicky,” she said. “I’m always well.”

At his visible skepticism she half-laughed, and pushed at his shoulder to direct him away from the railing and towards their temporary sleeping quarters. Towards Joe and the gravitational pull of him, Nicky’s magnetic north. “Get some rest. I’ll keep watch.”

Somewhat naively he thought, or perhaps hoped, that she always would.


End file.
